Many objects periodically need to be relocated in horizontal position (“position”) and/or vertical position (“elevation”), relative to a gravitational field. Table saws need to be repositioned within workshops; shipping containers need to have elevation and position changed; a flower container may need to be relocated on a deck. Some objects never experience a change in elevation or position; some experience one or more generally unrelated changes in elevation and/or position; some experience a cyclic change in elevation and/or position (for example, the objects are cyclically lifted up and down); while some experience change more often in one direction than another.
Many technologies have been developed over the years to change the position or elevation of objects. Cars and trucks have wheels; fork lifts and cranes can change the elevation of shipping containers; furniture has casters, including retractable casters. These technologies appear to be specific to the application. For example, in the context of retractable casters, U.S. Pat. Nos. 2,490,953 and 2,779,049 illustrate technologies which require that the object supported by the caster be tilted in a specific direction to engage the caster and then a different direction to disengage the caster; other existing examples, such as the example illustrated in U.S. Pat. No. 2,663,048, require additional parts, such as load-bearing cams or, as in U.S. Pat. No. 6,507,975, require manipulation of an external articulator to engage or disengage the caster.
Existing technologies, however, often require specific equipment or infrastructure, and/or require that the position and/or elevation changing equipment be manipulated in particular way, and/or require relatively expensive components which must be precisely engineered for the application context and/or which must be maintained over time.
In addition, existing technologies do not approach the problem from the perspective of a kinematic finite state machine, which can be in a finite number of different states, with transitions between the states caused by triggering events, in which the states define the memory condition of the state machine, the events define how the memory conditions may be processed, where the states are equivalent to logical statements, where there may be an order of the logical statements, and where the state machine may be reprogrammed.